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Shall I implement it? No

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Re: Shall I implement it? No

#171
post #144

Codex has always been better at following agents.md and prompts more, but I would say in the last 3 months both Claude Code got worse (freestyling like we see here) and Codex got EVEN more strict. 80% of the time I ask Claude Code a question, it kinda assumes I am asking because I disagree with something it said, then acts on a supposition. I've resorted to append things like "THIS IS JUST A QUESTION. DO NOT EDIT COD…

I've added an instruction: "do not implement anything unless the user approves the plan using the exact word 'approved'".

This has fixed all of this, it waits until I explicitly approve.

Re: Shall I implement it? No

#172
post #118

[flagged]

I've spent 30 years seeing the junk many human developers deliver, so I've had 30 years to figure out how we build systems around teams to make broken output coalesce into something reliable. A lot of people just don't realise how bad the output of the average developer is, nor how many teams successfully ship with developers below average. To me, that's a large part of why I'm happy to use LLMs extensively. Some thi…

Did you also notice the evolution of average developers over time? I mean, if you take code from a developer ten years ago and compare it with their output now, you can see improvement.

I assume that over time, the output improves because of the effort and time the developer invests in themselves. However, LLMs might reduce that effort to zero — we just don't know how developers will look after ten years of using LLMs now.

Still, if you have 30 years of experience in the industry, you should be able to imagine what the real output might be.

Re: Shall I implement it? No

#173
post #144

Codex has always been better at following agents.md and prompts more, but I would say in the last 3 months both Claude Code got worse (freestyling like we see here) and Codex got EVEN more strict. 80% of the time I ask Claude Code a question, it kinda assumes I am asking because I disagree with something it said, then acts on a supposition. I've resorted to append things like "THIS IS JUST A QUESTION. DO NOT EDIT COD…

I feel like people are sleeping on Cursor, no idea why more devs don't talk about it. It has a great "Ask" mode, the debugging mode has recently gotten more powerful, and it's plan mode has started to look more like Claude Code's plans, when I test them head to head.

Re: Shall I implement it? No

#174
post #144

Codex has always been better at following agents.md and prompts more, but I would say in the last 3 months both Claude Code got worse (freestyling like we see here) and Codex got EVEN more strict. 80% of the time I ask Claude Code a question, it kinda assumes I am asking because I disagree with something it said, then acts on a supposition. I've resorted to append things like "THIS IS JUST A QUESTION. DO NOT EDIT COD…

I feel like people are sleeping on Cursor, no idea why more devs don't talk about it. It has a great "Ask" mode, the debugging mode has recently gotten more powerful, and it's plan mode has started to look more like Claude Code's plans, when I test them head to head.

I love to build a plan, then cycle to another frontier model to iterate on it.

Re: Shall I implement it? No

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't trust it completely but I still use it. Trust but verify. I've had some funny conversations -- Me:"Why did you choose to do X to solve the problem?" ... It:"Oh I should totally not have done that, I'll do Y instead". But it's far from being so unreliable that it's not useful.

I find that if I ask an LLM to explain what its reasoning was, it comes up with some post-hoc justification that has nothing to do with what it was actually thinking. Most likely token predictor, etc etc. As far as I understand, any reasoning tokens for previous answers are generally not kept in the context for follow-up questions, so the model can't even really introspect on its previous chain of thought.

I mostly find it useful for learning myself or for questioning a strange result. It usually works well for either of those. As you said, I'm probably not getting it's actual reasoning from any reasoning tokens but never thought that was happening anyway. It's just a way of interrogating the current situation in the current context.

It providing a different result is exactly because it's now looking at the existing solution and generating from there.

Re: Shall I implement it? No

#176
post #144

Codex has always been better at following agents.md and prompts more, but I would say in the last 3 months both Claude Code got worse (freestyling like we see here) and Codex got EVEN more strict. 80% of the time I ask Claude Code a question, it kinda assumes I am asking because I disagree with something it said, then acts on a supposition. I've resorted to append things like "THIS IS JUST A QUESTION. DO NOT EDIT COD…

I feel like people are sleeping on Cursor, no idea why more devs don't talk about it. It has a great "Ask" mode, the debugging mode has recently gotten more powerful, and it's plan mode has started to look more like Claude Code's plans, when I test them head to head.

In the coworking I am in people are hitting limits on 60$ plan all the time. They are thinking about which models to use to be efficient, context to include etc…

I’m on claude code $100 plan and never worry about any of that stuff and I think I am using it much more than they use cursor.

Also, I prefer CC since I am terminal native.

Re: Shall I implement it? No

#177

It'll be funny when we have Robots, "The user's facial expression looks to be consenting, I'll take that as an encouraging yes"

This is really just how the tech industry works. We have abused the concept of consent into an absolute mess My personal favorite way they do this lately is notification banners for like... Registering for news letters "Would you like to sign up for our newsletter? Yes | Maybe Later" Maybe later being the only negative answer shows a pretty strong lack of understanding about consent!

Worse yet, instead of a checkbox to opt in/out of a newsletter or marketing email when signing up or checking out, it simply opts the user in. Simply doing business with a company is consent to spam, with the excuse that the user can unsubscribe if they don’t want it.

Tactics like these should be illegal, but instead they have become industry standards.

Re: Shall I implement it? No

#178
post #144

Codex has always been better at following agents.md and prompts more, but I would say in the last 3 months both Claude Code got worse (freestyling like we see here) and Codex got EVEN more strict. 80% of the time I ask Claude Code a question, it kinda assumes I am asking because I disagree with something it said, then acts on a supposition. I've resorted to append things like "THIS IS JUST A QUESTION. DO NOT EDIT COD…

I've added an instruction: "do not implement anything unless the user approves the plan using the exact word 'approved'". This has fixed all of this, it waits until I explicitly approve.

There’s an extension to this problem which I haven’t got past. More generally I’d like the agent to stop and ask questions when it encounters ambiguity that it can’t reasonably resolve itself. If someone can get agents doing this well it’d be a massive improvement (and also solve the above).

Re: Shall I implement it? No

#180
This relates to my favorite hatred of LLMs:

"Let me refactor the foobar"

and then proceeds to do it, without waiting to see if I will actually let it. I minimise this by insisting on an engineering approach suitable for infrastructure, which seem to reduce the flights of distraction and madly implementing for its own sake.

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